Salesforce.com CEO Marc Benioff jokes about having 5,000 of his
closest friends on Facebook. As result, he says, he knows more
about strangers than his employees.
At the company's recent annual Dreamforce conference in San
Francisco, Salesforce.com introduced Salesforce Chatter, designed
to let Salesforce customers bring Facebook- and Twitter-type
capabilities to applications they use running on the Force.com
cloud computing platform.
Using Facebook, "I know when my friends have gone to the movies,
but I don't know when my VP of sales last visited my top customer,"
said Benioff on the Dreamforce stage. "I know when I've been tagged
in a photo, but don't know when a key document has been
updated."
Facebook and Twitter are "genius" he said, proving that "once again
we've been eclipsed by the consumer."
Salesforce Chatter will let developers add pre-built profiles and
employee status updates -- similar to the ones people set up in
Facebook and Twitter -- to apps running on Force.com. Benioff
called it a collaboration and social networking platform that
companies might choose to use in place of Microsoft SharePoint,
Outlook, and IBM Lotus Notes.
Benioff also invited Twitter founder Jason Goldman (and a
Salesforce.com director) on stage. "Twitter is for sharing and
discovering content that's important to you in real time," Goldman
said. Twitter is important to businesses, Goldman said, because
"people are talking about your competitors on Twitter."
There's also a feed function in Chatter that will stream status
updates from people and apps (for example, such as a deal closing
in Salesforce CRM) into apps running on Force.com. Developers use
APIs provided by Salesforce to push data from apps into the
feeds.
Chatter will also let users filter relevant Twitter feeds into
their applications. For example, a user can set up a Twitter search
for a competitor and view those Tweets within an app.
Benioff said Chatter will be available early next year for free to
customers with existing Salesforce.com subscriptions. A special
edition for employees not using Salesforce CRM is priced at $50 per
user per month.